Amanda Levete CBE is a RIBA Stirling Prize winning architect and founder and principal of AL_A, an international award-winning architecture studio.
Since its formation in 2009, AL_A has refined an intuitive and strategic approach to design. Collaborating with ambitious and visionary clients, we develop designs that are conceptualised as urban projects not just buildings and projects that express the identity of an institution, a city or a nation. Recently completed projects include the Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition Road Quarter (2017) in London, the V&A’s largest building project in over 100 years; MAAT (2016), a Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, commissioned by EDP, one of the world’s foremost energy companies; Central Embassy (2017), a 1.5 million sq ft luxury shopping mall and hotel in Bangkok on the former grounds of the British Embassy; a 13-hectare media campus masterplan and a 37,700m2 headquarters building for Sky (2016) in London; and MPavilion 2015 in Melbourne.
Ongoing commissions around the world include the transformation of the flagship Galleries Lafayette department store on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris; a new centre for the cancer care charity Maggie’s in Southampton; two new buildings for Wadham College at the University of Oxford; the renovation and expansion of Paisley Museum; The Courtyard, a series of community mixed-use developments on 39 sites across Moscow; and the Monte St Angelo subway station in Naples.
For over a decade, Levete was a trustee of both leading social innovation centre the Young Foundation and the influential arts organisation Artangel. She is a regular radio and TV broadcaster, writes for a number of publications including the New Statesman and Prospect and lectures throughout the world. She is a Visiting Professor and formerly a MArch tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. In 2017 Levete was recognised in the Queen’s Birthday honours list and made a CBE for services to architecture and in 2018, was awarded the Jane Drew Prize.
Levete trained at the Architectural Association and worked for Richard Rogers before joining Future Systems as a partner in 1989, where she realised ground-breaking buildings including the Media Centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground and Selfridges department store in Birmingham.

Lord's Media Centre

The objective of the design was to respect and savour the essential nature of Lord’s while bringing to it a building that heralded the coming millennium and provided the most elegant and state-of-the-art media centre in the world.

It captured the public imagination with its form and function, transforming a generic brief into an elegant solution, made possible by the marriage of conceptual with technical inventiveness.

The Media Centre at Lord’s is one of the most innovative buildings of the twentieth century. The first all-aluminium, semi-monocoque building in the world, it represents a breakthrough, not just in the creation of a new three-dimensional aesthetic, but in its method of construction. This building was built and fitted out not by the construction industry but a boatyard, using the very latest advances in boat building technology.

The building is designed to house 250 of the world’s media during international cricket matches. It is the place from which the media broadcast their message while images of the building itself are then seen on millions of televisions around the world.